To Keep Your Job, Learn Something New

It’s become conventional wisdom that many of today’s workers will see their jobs replaced or transformed by ever-smarter machines. Who needs bus drivers and truckers when self-driving vehicles take over the road —and what happens to the thousands of body-shop workers who won’t be needed to repair dents when the sensors in these new vehicles head off fender benders?

A recent paper from Oxford University suggested that 47% of U.S. jobs are at high risk of being computerized in the next few decades, with potentially frightening consequences for workers.

Such concerns have raised urgent questions about the skills individuals need to survive in the workforce of the future. Not only is technology displacing workers, as it has in every economic transformation, but it is changing so rapidly that workers and employers are finding themselves unable to keep up, a situation that creates the paradox of a skills gap amid high unemployment.

“The Industrial Revolution required a major reskilling and upskilling, and so does the digital revolution,” said Charles Fadel, co-author of “21st-Century Skills” and founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign an organization devoted to understanding the requirements of the labor market. He was speaking at a gathering last week of economists, business representatives and workforce experts from North America and Europe that addressed the impact of technology on the labor market. The event was organized by the European Commission in concert with the Conference Board and Cornell University.

But more of the responsibility for that reskilling is shifting from governments and employers to workers. The reasons for this change are complex and varied, participants noted: governments—and the education systems they design and oversee—aren’t very good at keeping up with the rapid pace of skill evolution; companies seem to be spending less money on training because they don’t expect employees to stick around long enough to get a return on the investment; and high unemployment transfers pressure to individual workers to keep their knowledge fresh.

Some countries are trying to be proactive. This year, the United Kingdom will require schoolchildren to learn software coding from the time they enter primary school at age 5 until at least age 16—becoming possibly the first country to mandate such courses.

In most places, it is up to workers to continually master new technologies. And not every person has the ambition, time or flexibility to do so. As Fabio Rosati, the chief executive of online freelance marketplace Elance.com, told The Wall Street Journal a few months ago, the skills that are in highest demand by employers are turning over every two to three years now.

“One reason people don’t want to study ICT [information and computer technology] is because the skills change so quickly. They don’t want to have to keep updating their skills,” said Lucilla Sioli of the European Commission’s digital-technology initiative, called DG Connect. This is not laziness, she underscored—simply a concern that the pace of innovation creates enormous pressure for workers in these fields.

It remains unknown, too, what psychological and emotional toll this skills turnover and insecurity takes on workers who fear they’re constantly falling behind.

“We’re seeing rapid depreciation for IT skills,” said Sonny Tambe, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and an expert on the high-tech workforce. “So what happens to engineers over 40? You go to Silicon Valley [and ask that question] and you can see the panic in some people’s eyes.” (That won’t surprise the folks featured in this story about ageism in the high-tech world.)

Market forces, theoretically, should clear up this problem, as they have in past economic transitions, when competition propelled wages for sought-after workers higher and workers adjusted their skills to meet demand. That is happening today, but the process is slow and uneven, especially because the slack labor market is helping employers put off concerted, large-scale investments in training.

And companies themselves may be obstructing the naturally equilibrium-seeking labor market. The so-called skills gap has been manufactured by employers who simply don’t want to raise wages enough to nudge the skills of workers into equilibrium with demand, suggested an investment banker. “Companies that say ‘I can’t find the workers I need’ are leaving out the rest of that sentence. What they mean is, ‘I can’t find the workers I need at the price I want to pay.’”

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